IT’S another edition of World Anti-Corruption Day. This hardly means anything in the official circles of government in the country with otherwise infallible elements crashing serially. It’s like we never knew what we perceived.
President Buhari has worsened this with unprecedented self-indulgence in tortuous and contemptuous indifference to some incidents of corruption perpetrated by government functionaries of high standing and indeed others. Is this the same Maigaskiya Muhammadu Buhari we used to know? Yours sincerely got overwhelmed by the incessant manifestations of APC parallels to those of PDP led by the notorious Dasuki. As you’re almost losing your sanity over PDP’s Olisa Metuh, the Babachir Lawal element of the APC deepens your nausea for social degeneracy.
Perhaps more disturbing is the likelihood that an otherwise upright organization like the Waziri Adio-led Nigeria Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative, NEITI, is, according to media reports, reverting to the old regime of gross disregard for due process, transparency and accountability. NEITI’s case is particularly pathetic because Waziri took the unusual pain of documenting for generations, his management philosophy, in his book, The Arc of the Possible. Perhaps most commendable was Waziri’s offer of personal example of turning in the status of his assets to the Code of Conduct Bureau, CCB, after serving out his term, even as he wasn’t statutorily mandated to do that.
But even as the NEITI rating on transparency ranking may be dropping drastically, some other Nigerians are determined to make Nigeria function better even as all hope may not be lost on NEITI.
More than any other non-governmental organization today in Nigeria, the Human and Environmental Development Agenda, HEDA, has relentlessly upped the raison detre for anti-corruption campaigns at the risk of everything. They got serially scared and attacked, but they have decided to endure, committing their lives to the hands of the only giver and taker of lives, the Almighty. It is largely believed in the anti-corruption circles that HEDA’s focus on high-profile cases oozes enormous discomfort to corrupt big men especially those who had served in government at the centre. Silly souls, they resorted to alleged hired killers who let the hell loose on the chair of HEDA and his family early in the year.
This piece is the first instalment in a three-part series.
